Farris Lecture with Adam Hofri-Winogradow – Equity has No Place Here: Should Equitable Remedies be Available to Reverse Failed Tax Planning?

Event Description

Adam Hofri-Winogradow will explore an odd use of equity: the granting of equitable remedies to assist authors of tax minimization plans where their plans result in unexpected tax liabilities. Canadian law has in the current century first taken a strikingly liberal approach to granting rescission and rectification to reverse the tax results of failed, mistake-based tax planning, and later switched to an approach far more restrictive than those under UK and US law. He believes the current Canadian approach to be both too permissive and not permissive enough: given the importance of the tax-and-transfer system for providing equalizing redistribution, and the regressive redistributive effects of tax planning, state-funded courts should in general not grant equitable remedies to authors of tax minimization schemes that have met with unexpected tax burdens as a result of tax mistakes. He recognizes, however, that tax mistakes can lead to devastating results for taxpayers, and that such mistakes are to be expected given the complexity of our tax law and our acceptance of tax law changes operating retroactively. He therefore suggests that courts retain a power to grant rescission or rectification, as necessary, to eliminate mistake-based tax planning that will reduce a human taxpayer to insolvency if not eliminated, where such elimination is not realistically available in other ways.

Schedule of Events

• 5 - 6pm: Lecture
• 6 - 7pm: Reception - light refreshments will be served
   

*This event is eligible for 1hr of LSBC CPD credit.

Speaker

Adam Hofri-Winogradow’s research and teaching have long focused on trusts, including comparative doctrinal treatments of trust law topics, empirical studies of the ways trusts are used in practice by different sorts of clients, studies of many jurisdictions' recent dramatic reforms to their law of trusts, looking to make that law alternately client- and practitioner-friendly, historical and socio-legal accounts of the development of trust law and practice, and theoretical accounts of the social and economic functions trusts fulfil, including as a tool for subverting other parts of the law. 

About the Farris Lecture

To commemorate its 100th anniversary, Farris LLP (Farris), donated $200,000 to establish an endowment to support excellence in teaching and research in the areas of business law and advocacy and as a memorial to Mr. C. Francis (Frank) Murphy, Q.C., and Mr. Peter W. Butler, Q.C., former partners of the firm.